Maybe I should become more circumspect
Quote of note:
Recent court developments have been grim for those who cherish a free press.
On Dec. 9, a television reporter in Providence, R.I., Jim Taricani, was sentenced to six months of house arrest for refusing to reveal who gave him an F.B.I. videotape showing a local official taking a bribe. Mr. Taricani did nothing illegal. Yet the Rhode Island federal judge who sentenced him pointedly said that only health problems spared him a prison term.
The worry now is that a three-judge federal appellate panel in Washington will take an equally cramped view of reporters' rights and affirm sentences of up to 18 months in prison that a lower court imposed in October on Judith Miller of The New York Times and Matthew Cooper of Time magazine. At issue is the pair's principled refusal to disclose their sources in connection with the investigation that the United States attorney and special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald is leading into the leaking of the name of a covert C.I.A. officer, Valerie Plame, to the columnist Robert Novak.
Among the strange wrinkles in this case is that Mr. Novak, who first published Ms. Plame's name, seems to be in no jeopardy, while Mr. Cooper faces jail time stemming from an article he wrote exposing the administration's seamy motive of retaliating against Ms. Plame's husband for criticizing Iraq policy. Stranger still is Mr. Fitzgerald's decision to entangle Ms. Miller, since she never wrote a single article about the Plame controversy.
The appellate panel expressed palpable hostility to the notion that the First Amendment provides any protection for journalists subpoenaed to reveal their confidential sources to a grand jury. We hope that this is a case where the tenor of an oral argument does not foretell the content of a court's ruling. That same appellate hearing also explored another legal avenue the court could take to stop the two journalists from becoming the only people punished for the Bush administration's abuse of power in leaking the name of a covert C.I.A. operative.
